


Blessings of Arkay

by NervousAsexual



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 18:41:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18643879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: In the Hjaalmarch Stormcloak camp is an Imperial. He came to find his place between country and kin, but all he has left is his faith.





	Blessings of Arkay

Each day the wounded Imperial prayed to Arkay for the war to end, and each day the war continued.

Perhaps Arkay was the wrong divine. Perhaps he should have prayed to Talos, as the others in the camp did. Perhaps he should have prayed to Akatosh, as befitted an Imperial.

But the wounded Imperial had been worshipping Arkay since long before this war. For a time before the White-Gold Concordat was signed he had served in a temple of Arkay, tending the graveyard of Falkreath.

He had left to join the Stormcloaks partly out of spite. When conflict tore Skyrim apart it was openly assumed among some of the Nords in Falkreath that he would turn traitor, join the Imperial march to crush the rebellion. How he had tried to make them understand--Skyrim was his home as much as it was theirs. He was no Nord, it was true, but he had been born and raised here and had never agreed with the ban of Talos worship. No one had cared to listen. At least, no one he tried to convince had listened.

When Arrald Frozen-Heart and his detachment had passed through Falkreath and headed north he joined them. What better way to prove his loyalty than to fight and die for their cause?

Two years had passed since then, and now the wounded Imperial understood his mistake.

He lay in a tent stitched from deer pelts on a pile of blood-soaked straw. With him were two other casulties. Holger still cried--frostbite and fever took its toll. Tor, who had been alone on the battlefield for days, only the mercy of Stendarr preventing him from bleeding out in the snow, was deathly silent. They had each fallen in a skirmish not far from the Kjenstag Ruins, but each had fought the imperials bravely.

The wounded Imperial knew his companions only by voice, by Holger's pleas to Talos and by whispering voices that spoke of Tor's bravery. To see them would require turning onto his other side and he could not bear to have the pressure of his own weight on that side of his body.

His right eye was gone, taken from him not by a a war wound but by a common spriggan. What had been intended as a quiet patrol had been interrupted by a force of nature that may as well have been Skyrim itself. The spriggan had torn through the patrol easily, all but obliterating the Nords and tearing the Imperial apart. It plucked out his eye and gutted him and left him for dead.

In the beginning, when the pain was fresh and he thought he was dying he begged for the rites of Arkay. None came. No one in the camp knew the rites, a healer told him, and besides he was going to live.

He didn't care whether or not he would live. The rites would bring him some degree of peace. It would help in a way that healing potions and bandages could not. But they were far from the nearest shrine--the nearest priest of Arkay was Runil in Falkreath, and the mer was too old to travel to him.

He had wept and wept from pain and exhaustion and grief. An infection grew in the empty eye socket and soon enough he was too weak to cry.

He knew the other Stormcloaks wondered why he, an imperial, had survived, when every other member of his patrol had been killed. It was the same resentment that the people of Falkreath had felt, and for once he was too tired to deny it. For the first time he understood. This had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the empire itself. He was only a convenient wall to be battered by their fear and grief and anger. That was more of a relief than he could have anticipated.

Supplies were dangerously low, winter was at hand, and he was given ale to keep him quiet and warm. Between that and the realization that nothing he could do would change the fact of his race he slept more soundly.

Late one night, when the quartermaster's grindstone had gone silent and the only light came from the campfire, the camp's only other non-Nord came to him: a dark-complected Breton with tired eyes and the pointed ears his kind prized. The Imperial had been confused, had believed the Breton was going to heal his missing eye, but the Breton kept his gaze to the floor.

"I don't have magic," he said quietly. "I've never had the talent."

A Breton with no magical ability. How rare, and how ironic now that he desperately needed healing.

The Breton sat beside him and spoke quietly of his home. He too was outside of the hold where he grew up. He came from Whiterun, he said, and he knew a smith there who could make a false eye so life-like that no one would ever know he'd lost one. When the war was over and there was time they would go together back to Whiterun and have one made. It would feel so natural, the Breton said, nothing like the heavy glass eyes that weighed you down, and it wouldn't hurt anymore.

The wounded Imperial listened to him, half asleep. The sound of a voice speaking to him helped more than he'd thought it would. And when the Breton finally excused himself, said that he needed to get some sleep before morning patrol, he'd leaned over and pressed something into the Imperial's hand. In the dark he couldn't see, but from the feel of the round wooden beads and the eight-pointed star that fit so perfectly in the palm of his hand he knew what it was. Divines only knew where the Breton had found an amulet of Arkay.

There was no way to escape the snow. The tent where the wounded slept was perhaps the most intact of all the tents in the Hjaalmarch camp, but it was impossible to seal entirely against the snow. Even with the tent closed in on itself drifts still swept in. The quartermaster brought pelts for them, ice wolf, by the look of them, and still warm from the fire that tanned them. They came too late for Tor; a healer whispered that he had contracted witbane and hadn't long to live.

Though he couldn't stand, couldn't even sit up without tearing out the stitches in his belly, the wounded Imperial whispered the rites of Arkay into the darkness of the tent. When they carried Tor's body away he held the amulet against his chest and prayed.

And when the day came that the snow began to melt, faster than any spring thaw, the wounded Imperial pressed the amulet to his wounded eye and turned himself painfully from the wall.

Outside came the clash of steel, shouts, cries, the smell of burning flesh. Holger, still ragged with tears, sat up on his pile of straw. "What is happening?"

The Imperial pressed his hand to the wound on his belly. A few stitches torn, but only a little blood.

Holger crawled to the tent flap, a hand to his own wounds. He put out a hand a drew the flap aside only a little, only enough to see. The wounded Imperial saw his eyes go wide. He turned and said, "Thalmo--" and a spike of ice hurtled through the tent flap and pierced him cleanly through the chest.

The thought of his own wounds vanished and the Imperial was at his side, pulling him back from the point of entry.

Holger looked at him, confusion in his eyes. He opened his mouth as if to speak and blood came out instead of words. With shaking hands the Imperial fumbled around his neck for his amulet. The smell of magic burned in the air.

It was already too late; the Imperial knew that from the whistling of the nord's chest. He tried to pull to mind Arkay's Blessing, but this was nothing like the slow plodding death that came for Tor. The chaos split his concentration in a hundred different directions and he had only just bowed his head over the dying man what the flames tore the tent apart.

The Imperial screamed as the burning washed over him. He rolled on the dirt but the straw he had been lying on, though soaked through with blood, was still dry as tinder and the flames caught hold there and he could feel the heat catch the bandage on his torn eye.

He ripped the bandage from his face, the strength of the cloth tearing at his fingers. Blood poured form the torn stitches in his belly.

More magic now, even closer than before. A soul-trap. Holger. The Imperial could barely hold himself together enough to pray.

"Another one here," a voice called. It had all the smooth, dark tones of a Thalmor.

With nothing between him and the soul cairn but a charred amulet, the Imperial raised his head to the sound. In that moment there was no loyalty, no honor, no Skyrim. He prayed.

"An Imperial," a second voice, a second Thalmor, said, the thinnest trace of surprise in his tone. "A prisoner of war, do you think?"

Yes. If it meant survival then he would gladly play the captured soldier. He pulled at the amulet. Let them see. He worshipped Arkay. He was no threat to them.

"Doesn't matter. I'm down to a grand soul gem, anyway."

"But... He's an imperial. Shouldn't we take him back to his own people?"

"Please," the Imperial whispered to the fires around him. He would do anything for this to end. Anything.

But the sound of that first voice ran like freezing rain over him.

"Leave him," the Thalmor said. "He's only a man."

"Should I at least give him a spell and..." 

"No. He'll be dead soon enough."

The wounded Imperial opened his mouth to scream, and not a sound came out. It didn't matter. The Thalmor had already turned away.

* * *

He crawled from the ashes in the evening chill. 

The camp had been decimated. Blood on what remained of the snow, weapons lost and broken, but so few bodies.

He lay in the snow, unable to stand, unable to sit up. Too late. Too late for the law of Arkay. Too late for the thralls, the souls trapped in crystal. Too late for the Consecrations.

For proponents of the Eight, the Thalmor were blasphemers of the highest order.

The Imperial lay in the snow, still walking the line, trying to decide if he would live or die. He prayed to Arkay, but there were no answers to be found. He lay on the snow, dreaming of any way to make it right again.

As he lay the snow fell again where the fire had burned. Flakes settled on the wounds that Skyrim and the Aldmeri Dominion had given him, and the pain drifted away.

He dozed in the falling snow, and he made a decision. If he lived, if when the sun rose the Thalmor were wrong and he still drew breath, then he would fight. He would find in himself the strength to drag himself down from the Hjaalmarch hills, and he would do everything in his power to mold Skyrim into the place it should always have been.

The wounded Imperial had no way of knowing, but the blessing of Arkay waited for one such as he.

He would never make it back to Falkreath, nor would he ever find his way to that smith in Whiterun. He would never shape Skyrim in the way he dreamed. He would never make it out of those hills.

The Thalmor had been right. He was only a man. But even a man might gain the favor of gods.


End file.
